The 15 Best Post-Apocalyptic Board Games

I've always liked to go through — not around — the things that stress me out. Nowhere is this more evident than in my growing collection of post-apocalyptic board games. With water shortages and record heat scorching our country, any sane person would look for comfort instead of more of the same, but as the famed road warrior Max Rockatansky once said, it's getting hard to know who is crazier, me or everyone else.

So consider this my recruitment message! Thanks to the sudden boom of zombie board games earlier in the century, the current state of post-apocalyptic board games is thriving. From storybooks to worker placement games to full-fledged RPGs, these are some of the best post-apocalyptic board games available to help you manage your doomsday anxiety. Some are a perfect fit for large groups. Others will give you an excuse to stay home alone the next time your friends invite you out for the weekend.

While many of these lists offer a deluge of zombie titles, I've done my best to be restrained. Yes, you'll find standouts like "Dead of Winter" and "Dawn of the Zeds" among the entries, but I think we could all use a little break from the undead hordes. So from windsails to snowstorms to blatant "Waterworld" riffs, this list is designed to bring you every flavor of the apocalypse. Now, good luck to you and your ragtag group of survivors, and remember, out here, everything hurts.

Few game mechanics capture my interest like a good storybook. While many games in my collection were chosen for their replayability, my love of stories means I will always give precedence to a campaign-based game with a beginning, middle, and end. So a game like "Aftermath" — which, like "Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion," uses a spiralbound notebook as its game board and script — is of immediate interest to me. Bring on the miniature apocalypse.

In the wake of humanity's sudden disappearance, nature has begun to reclaim our ruins. In "Aftermath," you and your friends play as a group of small rodents scavenging for supplies in a decaying metropolis. Using the main storybook as your guide, you will travel between locations, triggering unique encounters and fighting rival parties — and sometimes enormous creatures hunting you as prey. With 20-plus missions and side missions to complete, "Aftermath" is the perfect midsized game for those looking to add a little bit of worldbuilding to their next game night.

Unlike most campaign games, "Aftermath" allows for communication between the players and the would-be enemies. Each situation is designated as either safe or hostile, and the safe condition will enable players to attempt to communicate with enemy figures on the map. Succeed, and you'll defeat an NPC and remove a threat card from the deck. For a grizzled RPG veteran like myself, who prefers to persuade characters rather than fight them, this mechanic promises to add a nice variety to the encounters.

While "Night of the Living Dead" launched the zombie genre, "Dawn of the Dead" established some of its most important themes. Sure, it's all fun and games when lighting up a few stragglers, but the longer you survive, the bigger and more dangerous the horde becomes. No game promises to capture that better than "Dawn of the Zeds."

Walking a fine line between a wargame and a tower defense system, "Dawn of the Zeds" situates you in the crosshairs of a zombie horde. You and a ragtag group of heroes are making your last stand in the small town of Farmingdale, but with each passing wave of zombies, your chances at survival dim. To have any shot at escape or a cure, you must manage your resource boards, keep your infections to a minimum, and put a wall of soldiers between you and the advancing hordes.

While "Dawn of the Zeds" is technically a multiplayer game, every board game resource I could find firmly pointed to the single-player version as the definitive experience. This is in keeping with the other lane-defense games published by Victory Points Games in their States of Siege series. From World War I to the English Civil War, these mechanically aligned titles present players with a grueling battle against the clock and their enemies. "Dawn of the Zeds" might be the most populist title in the series, but it's just as challenging and even more narratively satisfying.

"On the outskirts of civilization, two rival gangs are locked in a deadly car chase as they bid to outrun the unrelenting dust storm." These are the opening words of "Dustbiters," a two-player card game pitting man against man and nature. The entire game feels like an exploration of the storm scene from "Mad Max: Fury Road" in which two convoys clash in the wake of a global storm. If that's not a good idea for a post-apocalyptic board game, I don't know what is.

The rules for "Dustbiters" are almost shockingly simple. After each player contributes to the convoy — four cars in front, four in the back — you will spend your turn performing four actions. You can add vehicles to the front of the convey, move existing cars up in the order, add cards to your hand from the draw deck, or use the unique powers described on each vehicle. Players spend each round jockeying for position, but at the end of a turn, whatever car brings up the rear is swept off the board by the dust storm.

With memorable artwork from designer Terri Vellman and a modest price point (the game is $20 on the iam8bit website), "Dustbiters" is a winning combination of simple and stylish. It feels like the perfect airport game for people who want to be economical with their space but are unafraid to share their nerdiness with complete strangers. Hell, I'm sold. I bought my second edition copy halfway through this write-up.

I don't think of myself as a franchise guy, but my tabletop collection tells another story. With copies of "Fallout," "Fallout Shelter," and "Fallout: The Roleplaying Game" occupying my shelf, it's clear I like my post-nuclear wastelands with a side of retro-consumerism. Thanks to a well-placed expansion, "Fallout: Atomic Bonds," a board game that was once widely acknowledged as broken has been given a shot at redemption. "Fallout" now delivers on the promise present in the base game.

Even without "Atomic Bonds," there's a lot to like about the original "Fallout" game. Nobody squeezes better production design out of a license than the team at Fantasy Flight, and many elements of the game, from equipment to the quest deck, make you feel right at home as a vault dweller emerging into the apocalypse. Still, any praise of the game must come with two catastrophic caveats: The endgame scenario is an arbitrary mess, and the multiplayer turns a collaborative premise into a competitive flop.

Thankfully, "Atomic Bonds" offers solutions for both of those problems. With new endgame scenarios and tweaks to the combat system that allow multiple characters to shoot away at enemies, "Fallout" is now the collaborative wasteland experience it was always meant to be. With a reasonable price point attached to the expansion ("Atomic Bonds" costs $15 or less at most online retailers) the game collecting dust on my shelf has been bumped to the front of the line.

It takes a lot for me to like a worker placement game. While many games present players with complex puzzles built around tough decision-making, these titles are often strong on strategy and light on theme. I need more than a series of brown cubes and yellow squares. I need to know that my choices come with stakes. Thankfully, games like "Outlive" prove that worker placement and post-apocalyptic themes are a match made in nuclear heaven.

The year is 2079, and humanity has been reduced to an estimated 30,000 survivors in the wake of a devastating war. To survive, each tribe must compete for the attention of the Convoy, a mysterious organization hunting for the strongest survivors to bring into their post-apocalyptic utopia. However, if you can manage your supplies, add new modules to your shelter, and keep the irradiation from killing everyone you love, you might escape this wasteland hellhole once and for all.

Fans of video games like "This War of Mine" and "Fallout Shelter" will find a kindred spirit in "Outlive," which uses a combination of worker placement and resource gathering to build out bigger and more robust colonies. The competitive element of "Outlive" comes from the ruined cities surrounding you, where players will choose heroes to collect resources and jockey for power among the tribes. It's a lot of moving parts, but if you're someone who likes your technology trees with a little atomic flavor, "Outlive" is the game for you.

What if the crew from "Mad Max: Fury Road" abandoned their quest for the green place and drove off into the salt? How would things have gone for Furiosa and company if they were forced to navigate mile after mile of open terrain? That's the central premise of "Saltlands," a tile-based board game that sees you chasing rumors of civilization in a dusty wasteland. Take a wrong turn — or misread the direction of the wind — and your bleached corpse may be the only evidence that you once called this desert home.

In "Saltlands," you and your friends hunt for a mythical escape from the desert as a horde of raiders descends upon the wasteland. Each turn, players take the standard assortment of actions (move, trade, use their character's unique ability, etc.) to inch closer to the promised land. Finally, if players can collect enough rumors, those markers allow them to escape, leaving their opponents behind to face down the violent horde and their cruel god (which is to say, they lose).

Like the other titles on this list, "Saltlands" uses the post-apocalyptic wasteland as a backdrop for interesting new game mechanics. Here, that mechanic is the wind. Many of the vehicles found in "Saltlands" use makeshift sails to operate, and players must always be aware of wind direction – and strength when determining their mobility. This mechanic adds a layer of uncertainty to character movement, forcing you to react to the environment, not just the other way around.

Apocalypses typically come in one of two flavors. On the one hand, you've got your sepia-toned showcases of human suffering (think John Hillcoat's adaptation of "The Road") and on the other, the wacky apocalypse found in films like "Radioactive Dreams" and "Waterworld," So if the name "Wasteland Express Delivery Service" didn't tip you off, the rulebook opens with a sprawling introduction from a character named Dispatch ("both my name and occupation"). Yeah, that's the goofball good stuff.

In "Wasteland Express Delivery Service," you and your opponents play as rival delivery drivers at the world's end. As you zip around the hexagonal map, you battle raiders, purchase and deliver cargo, and keep an eye on the ever-shifting marketplace for supplies (water, weapons, and food). Winning the game means being the first to deliver a set amount of priority cargo, but be wise: You may want to upgrade your vehicle before heading into the wasteland's heart.

There are many great examples of how "Wasteland Express" marries theme and gameplay, but one of my favorites is the cargo deliveries. The game makes it clear that you cannot deliver cargo to the same outpost twice in a row, but rather than leave that as a purely mechanical decision, the designers ground this requirement in the narrative. "You struck a good bargain — and you were kind of a d***," the rulebook explains. It's a great example of how the best post-apocalyptic games can bleed fun.